


nesting dolls

by pinkcupboardwitch



Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-08 18:54:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20840342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkcupboardwitch/pseuds/pinkcupboardwitch
Summary: Worlds within worlds. An assortment of prompts and alternate universes I am slowly working my way through.





	nesting dolls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fathomfive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fathomfive/gifts), [itsalwaystheapocalypse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsalwaystheapocalypse/gifts).

> For fathomfive, to whom I promised this a month ago exactly and whose reviews always warm my cold black heart, and for itsalwaystheapocalypse, enthusiastic cheerleader of black-hearted things. Apologies for the lateness - I moved this month and packing was a mess.

** Trope Prompt: hurt/comfort**

“Flowers,” Nasi repeats softly, a posy still clutched in each small fist. “These are just for your pillow, to smell pretty, and these -“ she raises the packet of small dream-blue flowers - “you put in your tea to help you sleep better. My grandmama showed me. They say in the kitchens and the servants’ halls you don’t sleep. They say but they don’t do anything. _I_ do something,” she finishes in a nervous rush.

The king is still blinking down at her. In the streets, the talk is always of how this king is now the face of London itself: more vibrant, young again, beautiful. Now that she’s seeing him close for the first time, Nasi wonders why the adults never speak of the obvious. If this is London’s face, London has the saddest eyes in the world.

Then all of a sudden London smiles down at her: oh, such a grave, sweet smile. Stooping a little slowly, as though stiffened by the spring mists, he takes the flowers from her hands.

“Thank you, Nasi,” the king says.

* * *

** Setting prompt: coffee shop AU**

“Are you really just ordering a flat white because it’s got ‘white’ in the name?”

“Yes. Next question.”

Here is the tragedy: just once in her life, Astrid would really, really like to know what a cotton candy frappucino tastes like.

* * *  
** Word prompt: sports **

-

All their weapons are new to London. There are the scythes, of course. There is the whip Athos uses like an extension of his own hand in battle, there are the poisons and the knives and the rings on Astrid’s hands. There is Holland.

Even so, their swords give him pause. Swords are a noble’s weapon in London, to start, and these are no nobles. But the strangeness goes beyond that. Maktahn blades are heavy brutal things that can cleave bone in half. The twins use blades as seemingly thin as needles, with basket hilts to guard the hand and an exquisite balance to them. These blades are quick enough to slice buttons off clothing, to pierce a greatsword’s defense and put out an eye and go dancing backwards before the pain even registers. To dart back in and take another eye, then the upper lip, then the lower, then to slit each nostril in turn. He’s seen them.

“Where did you learn to fight like that?” he dares once. He’d been watching the twins spar in the great echoing marble exercise hall. Even their clothes when they train are different from anything he’s ever seen. Padded jackets, faceless wire masks, breeches cut close enough he can see the muscles contracting and quivering in their thighs like horses’. As for the way they move - lunging, stabbing, circling. A game of Ost played out almost faster than the eye can see with steel and ragged breath.

For now the game is paused: they’ve descended on him for towels and water. Astrid is wiping her neck with a towel; Athos gives him a wry, speculative look as he opens his quilted jacket and fans his chest with it. “Would you believe us if we said we’ve inherited a secret family tradition of blademasters dating back three centuries to before the Reckoning?”

No. “If you wish it, lord.”

“Don’t try to play the diplomat, Holl,” Astrid breaks in impatiently. “It doesn’t suit you. You’re a hammer and you’re stupid; know your place.”

“He is stupid,” Athos agrees, a musing light in his eyes as he lifts his blade, “but oh, so pretty when he’s stupid.”

The blade dips beneath Holland’s chin, then lifts it ever so slowly; his eyes are forced up to the ceiling. He does not like this. He does not like it at all, being just barely able to see Astrid watching with a smirk and his throat open to Athos. The blade never leaves his skin, the pressure never lightens as it trails slowly down to the base of his throat, almost but not quite hard enough to draw blood. When it reaches his cravat it just pushes the folds of linen out of the way, until his throat is utterly bared to them.

“Allez,” Athos says softly. “Maybe one day if you’re good I’ll teach you to fight too.”

* * *

** Word prompt: colors**

-

He comes across the term in an old, old book. Sky-maid’s ribbons, the kenning calls it. Regnboga. Rainbow in the old diplomats’ tongue.

Athos flatters himself that he is a fairly well-studied antiquarian: he can date virtually any relic pre or post Reckoning, up to the beginning of the second dynasty, and even when he hasn’t found a mechanism in person he can almost always describe how it works. But he has no idea what this is.

He reads in a Far London scholar named Aristotle geometries that explain why rainbows are never greater than semicircles, still less full circles; in others, that a rainbow may be produced either by the sun reflecting in individual water droplets or off clouds shaped like concave mirrors. He reads that a rainbow may never appear more than forty-two degrees above the horizon, and of experiments with crystals and water droplets that can faithfully reproduce miniature rainbows. But no book can tell him what blue is. Blue: the blue that these authors take for granted sounds so vivid. So unlike the blue of his own eye. Blue as the sky. He had not realized until today that blue skies could be an observed fact rather than a poet’s dreaming fancy.

For tonight, at least, Athos does not speak, does not kill. Instead the king leans his cheek on his hand in the guttering candlelight and looks off into the middle distance, trying to imagine a blue he will never see.

* * * 

** Word prompt: sound. **

Translation note: Jag är ledsen - I’m sorry.

Warning for torture.

-

There should be screaming, but there is not. The man thrashes against the hand holding his head fast underwater, broken nails scrabbling at the bucket. Bubbles and foam spurt to the surface, bubbles and foam and blood.

Kell watches as they finally let him up, drag him on his crippled feet to the iron chair and strap him back in at the throat, wrist, waist, knee, ankle. Naked to the waist. The mouth streaming blood and water. All that terrifying wiry strength lolling like a doll.

“Astrid!” the man sobs. The only sound he has made, apart from raw screaming. When they’d burned his hands until they looked like nothing so much as raw tallow, it had been a woman’s name he’d screamed until his voice gave out. “Astrid, Astrid!”

Kell’s stomach roils despite himself, but his lip curls. He turns away. In his hand he turns over a flattened, smoky grey crystal.

None of the books or scholars at the Sanctuary could tell him whether a translation rune could work across devices. None could even believe such a thing existed until Kell showed them. The translation rune and the speaking crystal alike: both are new to these three centuries. Valuable tools. Valuable ransoms.

Kell tells himself that Maxim will be pleased, but at heart he knows he doesn’t care. A second layer of thought follows on that: one that calls up the scars on Holland’s forearms, and the bones in the floor, and the hushed breath of a terrorized city.

So he thinks, and justifies himself, and then is honest once more and admits that none of those really matter to him either. Not enough.

What matters is this. His brother had died. Died at Athos’s hand. Rhy had lived, to be sure. But first he had been murdered. That is enough.

He’s never used one of these devices before, but he can guess at the mechanism. It’s Makt, after all. It only takes a little searching with his fingers before he finds the hidden spring. He presses his thumb to it; a fat drop of blood wells up. Kell watches with detached interest as tiny grooves ferry the blood until it forms an unfamiliar rune on the crystal’s surface, as the crystal suffuses with color for a moment before fading to an even more ashen tone, like a half-shuttered window on a colorless world. When it chills precipitously in his hand, he knows he’s succeeded.

And then the sound he’s been waiting for.

“Dösva? Ös-vo tach?” A woman’s voice.

Kell says, “You shouldn’t have let him go to the ball.”

There is across two worlds a moment of stark silence. A cracked wail goes up from the chair. “Astrid! Jag är ledsen!”

And then at last Astrid Dane begins to scream.

* * *  
** Word prompt: casino**

-

The gentleman always bets on white.

He is not a gentleman, exactly, and this roulette wheel swirls red and black like any other. But it amuses his masters to call him that among the other names they have for him, and the plays he makes with his hands are only a blind for the odds he continually calculates behind his eyes.

He bets on white, always. He bets on the white gardenia pristine in a devil’s buttonhole, on the sudden gleam of teeth gripping a cigar. He bets on a whip with a carved ivory handle. He bets on the death’s-head.

He plays in silence and unsmilingly, regardless of whether he wins or loses. The stack of chips before him grows ever higher, sometimes diminishing, but never by much, never for long. He is not the only man who plays as though this is no game, but none are so still as him: a motionless black spot in the room swirling with noise, color, drink, laughter. Money money money everywhere, until the smell of it is as tangible as flesh. The champagne flows faster. The laughter tunes to a higher key.

The King of Spades comes sauntering through the crowd, hands casually in his pockets, head held calmly aloft. The scent of gardenia follows him. The gentleman’s hands begin to shake.

“Bien joué, monsieur,” the dealer tells him in the liquid accent of this island country. The King never looks at him. He’s watching the poker table, the cream or tanned necks bowed unaware over it, one lean hand clenching and unclenching with luxuriant slowness in his pocket.

“Monsieur.” The gentleman blinks. He touches a hand to his upper lip, his temple, where a sudden sheen of sweat gleams. Then he reaches for the pile of chips slid across to him and makes to add them to his stack. His hand will still not quite work. The whole tower collapses.

Diamonds encircle his neck. Diamonds glitter and fill his vision. Mink presses against his cheek, beneath it flesh that never grows warm. The Queen laughs and blows smoke out past her pointed canines, the burning cigar so close to his eye.

“Worried?” Her voice is a rich trill of laughter. “Don’t be. It’s my money, after all.”

She gleams around the table in amusement and a laugh goes up in turn, like light struck and refracted off a crystal. Some uneasy, some genuine as they know how to be. Behind them all are the looks. Behind them are the glances at her hands, at his hands, at the money held in so many little chips, at the diamonds that enfold her like a mail shirt and the diamond in his ear, the glances that breathe so much more of innuendo and rarefied distaste.

_It is not the money, it is not the money _, he wants to scream at them. _The house always wins when it comes to money but they are playing for hate of you. Money from your pockets goes straight to fund mercenaries and bombs and viruses sent against your holdings around the world. You think you can hold them to rules of human greed but you’re wrong, she is diamond, diamond, diamond and she will cut the flesh from your bones. _

She touches his neck, just below his ear. He stills utterly. He does not even flinch when the cigar comes waving lazily by his eye again.

It is not his eye, after all. He doesn’t remember how he’d lost it: drugs and shock combined had seen to that. His masters’ story changes every time. It doesn’t much matter. Now he wears a golden eye.

A gentleman tonight, a joker tomorrow, whatever they want of him: their wild card muzzled and tamed. He’d had a name once, a proper one that never changed. He doesn’t remember it now unless they want him to. Most of the time now, they like cutting it out of him.

He’s theirs, after all. They can have him any way they want, but they like him most when he does the breaking himself.

The gentleman who is not a gentleman plays on; wherever he goes now he smells smoke and gardenia, and his eye stays as gold as a devil’s heart. The gun he carries under his jacket has the king of spades embossed on the grip, and over his heart like a saint’s medal he carries the queen of diamonds.

* * *

  
**Setting prompt: dark AU**

-

_ Every time a new Targaryen is born, the gods toss the coin of madness and greatness in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land. _

Athos is dead, and Holland is dead, and she should be dead too.

Numb, Astrid picks her way through the field of corpses. They had fought the living here, she and Athos and their oldest slave, their first-bound, and then they had fought the dead. She had won. She alone. She all alone.

Somewhere to the east, the Stormborn is winging towards Westeros. Rhaegar’s blue-haired son marches at the head of his Golden Company. But the Targaryens sowed their seed wide, and Mad King Aerys begot bastards of his own, even upon a roving huntress half Ironman and half northern, and these lands hold blood and magic old enough to rival all the east.

Once, too, they had held love. No more.

In one hand her sword, the tip dragged heedlessly across the coarse ground. In the other hand her brother’s crown. Her hand digs into the iron spikes until the blood wells and drips down onto the field soaked with blood and dark sorcery.

She is blood of the dragon, blood of the ice. She chooses what shape victory takes. There is old, old magic in these lands. Almost all of it is used as a lock against the Others. But for every lock, there is a key. For every lock, there is a way to open it from inside.

There is a new rune painted in her own blood between those legendary eyes: eyes colored violet shimmering into blue. A brighter blue seeps across them both now like ice across a twilight sea, brighter than even bloodlust could ever turn them before.

Lightly, almost daintily, the queen who died and lives steps over the corpses littering the top of the fortress steps and picks her way down.

The broken thing at the foot of the stairs may have been a man once. His garb is as black as any crow’s, though his oaths were bought at the end of a branding iron and sworn to two creatures radiant and terrible. In the moonlight, the blood that pools around his head, seeping through the strands of charcoal hair, looks true black. She stands looking down at him, head a little on one side, for a long time.

_ A Targaryen alone in the world is a terrible thing. _

She nudges him with her boot.

Her dead slave’s eyes open, and they are every bit as blue as her own.

* * *  
** Trope prompt: time travel**

Trigger warning for war.

-

They come out of the trenches as though risen from the grave. Two men, identical with their vaguely old-fashioned clothing and stark-boned faces, their loping long-legged stride. It is the spotless white of those clothes more than anything, in this world of endless soulbreaking mud, that sends Corporal Archie Tuttle-Woosley scrambling up to intercept them.

“Halt!” He levels his carbine at the right-hand one, but his voice shakes without knowing why. He has been at war eleven months, long enough to have taken part in enough bayonet combat and charges over the edge to wake screaming for the rest of his life. But still his voice shakes as he looks at these two, and the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Halt or I shoot! State your business!”

Inconceivably, the two stop.

Thirty feet off, they look him over. The prey-animal instinct in Archie, the small soft frightened part that has not stopped screaming since his first bombardment, begins to crack open. It is not that they are calm, exactly, although they are. It is not even that they are fearless. More than anything, they look uncomprehending, as though a child had run up and pointed a stick at them.

“Oh,” the left-hand one says at last. His neck is oddly, loosely disjointed, as though he only holds it straight with difficulty. “Oh, I know what that is. It’s a gun. Holland showed me once.”

The words sound English but they don’t quite match the movement of his mouth. Archie latches onto what he recognizes. Dutchmen - or Jerries? Something, somewhere, is screaming at him to run. “I said state -“

The sky opens up.

Archie ducks beneath the bombardment, the wall of sound, the earth screaming: impossible not to. Even the left-hand man spins in a half-crouch, hand flying to his hip as though for a sword or a whip. And even through the careening, splintering hell of it - through the distant screaming horses and the shells’ shrieking whistle and the pounding, pounding, human ears human flesh and bone were not made for this - Archie still registers for a moment how odd that sliver of expression is. Startled rather than frightened. As though he had never seen this before. Here, here in Flanders, after three years of war.

The man on the right has not moved at all.

He’d widened his stance and braced his feet when the first shell hit. Now he stands swaying as calmly as a man aboard a moving train. Cool eyes survey the wasteland of trenches, barbed wire, shells, machine gun fire: men torn to pieces or dangling on razor wire, men holding their guts in their hands, men screaming for their mothers.

“Oh,” he says softly, tracking the arching path of a shell splitting the sky above. Interest lights those pale eyes like a spark on ice. Through the din, the cold soft voice is as distinct as though he’d spoken in Archie’s ear. “Oh, hello.”

Not a man, but a woman, Archie realizes. And then, as that cold pale gaze levels back at him, as the head tilts a little to the side, he realizes his mistake once more.

Not a man. Not human at all.

Feebly, he raises his bayonet.

The heel of that pale palm hits his neck exactly at the join with his jaw. His body hits one wall. His head hits another.

The rest of his unit never even sees them coming.

It is Ypres, 1917. There are still thirteen more days of killing to go.

* * *

** Trope prompt: road trip **

In the movies, criminals on the run always head to Thailand or Bali. Somewhere with sun and sea and a lot of fruit. But the twins burn even on cloudy days, for one thing, and they grew up on Nordic noir for another. For a third, Astrid points out, pulling her baseball cap lower down, everyone here looks like them, and they already speak the language. So when everything comes tumbling down like an empire of cards instead of money and steel, they swing far west.

There is sun here, and sea.

“Oh,” they both sigh as they round a blind curve at seventy miles an hour and come across a stretch of black sand beach, the sunlight so pure through the clouds it rings metallic. The Ring Road is the stuff of traveler’s tales, glossy airport periodicals, sleek fashion editorials in the magazines Astrid likes. Gorgeous and elemental as the man they’d left to die covering their escape. But it is also like the bones of their mother’s face, their mother who’d told them stories a millennium old about their ancestors and the tumbling endless land they had settled. The land she had left. Dagnýjardóttir and Dagnýjarson they would be here, if anyone ever asked. The daughter and son of Dagny.

It is not exactly coming home to die, but then again, in a different light, it is.

-

“I would have liked to see Scotland.”

“… You’re thinking about _Skyfall_, aren’t you.”

“What? It would have been cool.”

“They shot the _car_.” Astrid’s head and shoulders are buried in the trunk, but her tone is deeply aggrieved.

“That was not cool,” Athos concedes. He looks over her shoulder, watching as she unwraps oiled-paper packages and checks each one. Through metal, through oiled paper, through their own containers, if they go through a drop of rain Astrid still wants to make certain. A sniper’s rifle and scope. Beside it, two sub machine guns. Rolls and rolls of spare ammunition. A set of remote detonators. Wires and pliers and clamps. Good tools to have when pursued by what might as well be all the forces of heaven and earth.

Astrid tightens the knot again on the last package. “We’re in business,” she remarks to Athos and no one in particular. Grabbing a packet of beef jerky and handing half to him, she shoves the trunk lid down. Athos swings into the driver’s seat this time, one hand on the wheel, the other holding his jerky while he gnaws happily.

They’re sixteen miles down the road, crossing a patch of windswept pine, before Astrid speaks again.

“Athos.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not Bond.”

“Fuck you.”

“You’re Silva.”

“Oh. That’s all right then.”

-

They drive, and they drive. Pay for gas, or kill for it. Speak their mother’s tongue. The road runs on two lanes, then one. The asphalt, black like ink, runs by the coast that plunges into the sea that plunges into the horizon. It grows very quiet, here at the end of all things.

_There are eight hundred and twenty-eight miles of this, _he can tell her. He can tell her, _the difference between a hunt and a chase is that in a hunt they have not yet seen us. _He can tell her, _when this hunt becomes a chase we will know because we will see their faces too._ He can tell her, _I am sorry I have not been more like you._

Astrid glances at him from the driver’s seat, just once. He’s been tapping and twitching his fingers on the armrest; two of her cool fingers come to rest on the outer bone of his wrist. Athos draws a breath. A second, steadier one. He does not speak after all, and this is all right too.

-

There is something elemental to it, this waiting. Clean as the long breath while one steadies a rifle against one’s shoulder, the exhale. The firing. Pure and merciless, like a bullet suspended, like Zeno’s arrow. Cleaving sky.

-

“I thought I would be more scared when it came,” he says one night, when the stars are scattered over the sky like a thick handful of sugar. “Or that I wouldn’t see it coming at all.”

“Which?” is all Astrid asks, hands pillowed behind her head.

“I don’t know. Both.”

“Do you like this better?”

“Yeah. I get to see you. Talk to you.”

There is no gleam of teeth in the darkness, but he knows she smiles nonetheless. “Then I’m glad.”

Zeno’s arrow whistling without motion. Damocles’ sword swinging on its string. The surf, the wind, Astrid’s pulse beating in her wrist against his when she slips her hand down in silence to hold his.

He wonders, when it is time for the end, if he will be able to smile as she does. He hopes so.

_Let us talk of graves_, Athos thinks, a silent recital in the half-space between dream and thought, and then _To be_, and sleeps before he finishes either.

-

They come at daybreak one day, over the crest of a hill, the sky breaking open and sunlight raining down. In the distance, a helicopter chops low and churning nearer to them.

The twins know. They’ve parked their car sideways on the top of the next hill over. Rudimentary cover. There’s a copse of trees nearby where they can run for cover when the chopper gets near. Somehow he doubts they will.

Athos glances sideways and down at Astrid crouched against the car, strapping a hunting knife to her thigh, two pistols already stuck into her waistband. A Molotov sits between her feet, half a dozen others nearby ready to be assembled. Her white-blonde hair whips fiercely around her face, strands loosened from her coiled bun. She looks back up at him and grins.

He brushes her cheek with his fingertips, then touches them to the sniper’s rifle he’d spent half last night assembling and cleaning, cradling it like a lover. He hefts it now, still smooth and easy. The touch of his sister’s face against it like a blessing.

The light, the light, goddamn, if he could only live. But he’s made a choice. He sees her. He talks to her. He touches her face. It has always been this, since the day he was born.

Athos braces the butt of the rifle against his shoulder, the barrel on top of the car. He sights down the scope, exhales, and smiles.


End file.
